Article Sidebar

Share this Story: The day I didn't die

Trending

Article content

For those that choose to travel beyond the familiar and pre-planned, the world provides, on occasion, glimpses of things so bizarre or so calamitous that the events are lodged in memory forever. You don’t forget — at least I don’t! — those days that you didn’t die.

The subtropical Churia Hills of Nepal’s Terai region drop down to near-impenetrable elephant grass along the Narayani River. It is here that myself and three friends rented two elephants and a pair of mahoutdrivers and spotters for a day spent searching for wildlife, especially — we hoped — the near-extinct one-horned Asian rhinos. Of which, at that time, there were 95 in the world.

The day I didn't dieBack to video

Atop the elephant, the mahoutsat astride the beast’s neck, issuing commands.Behind him, myself and my British friend, Andrew, rode on some cargo netting. The spotter stood astern, maintaining his balance with a taut length of rope. Our two female companions rode the bigger, tusked male. When, at last, we came upon a female rhino and its child in the sun-dappled forest bordering the river, their appearance came as an epiphany. For a moment, we were thrilled. So close. So rare. It didn’t occur to me to also think: so dangerous!

Advertisement

Story continues below

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Article content continued

A rhino mother and her calf grazing.Getty Images

But then, without warning, the mother charged the elephant I was riding. The baby rhino followed.

In a second, the bucolic scene erupted into chaos. The mahout began shouting for help. The elephant began trumpeting in fright and took off, its speed increasing with each passing second, and me and my companions atop an 5000 kg, three-metre-high, out-of-control cannonball.

Small trees, bushes, low-hanging branches suddenly meant nothing to the elephant. I glanced behind. The rhino had nearly caught up, its thrusting horn five metres from a view most veterinarian proctologists might cherish.

Advertisement

Story continues below

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Article content continued

I briefly allowed myself the thought that — as a way of dying — this would be unique, falling off a fleeing elephant into the path of an angry rhino.

Andrew shouted, “Branch!” and I turned just in time to see a low-hanging limb coming at my head. I clung, flattened to the cargo net as he announced the arrival of each new, low-hanging branch, and the elephant continued its bazooka trajectory through the forest — with the rhinos close behind.

Then, the women’s elephant — having circled ahead — appeared, trumpeting, charging nowtowardus and the pursuing rhinos. We veered right. And the mother rhino caught its first glimpse of a massive male elephant with ears outspread and curving tusks lowered, threatening to impale the animal. It veered left, followed by its baby. My epitaph, I reluctantly realized, would be mundane. No death-by-rhino. For that, I was not unhappy.

Advertisement

Story continues below

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Article content continued

The rhino, taken after the incident, when the writer followed it for a couple of hours through the forest.Daniel Wood

Jaga! Jaga!

The Borneo jungle is as enigmatic as quantum physics. Arboreal ferns and celadon-colored bromeliads crowd the branches of 60 metre-high hardwoods, some with buttresses like gothic cathedrals.

Beneath the trees, the humidity is oppressive; the feeling claustrophobic. Anything is possible. It is at the end of an hour’s hike into Sarawak’s remote Gunung Mulu National Park that I reach the massive caves I’d heard rumours about decades before as a young Peace Corps volunteer in Borneo.

It is at the entrance to humungous Deer Cave that the words spoken by an exiting park ranger to my erstwhile guide James gives pause. “Big snake in there,” the ranger says. “Jaga! Jaga!”

Advertisement

Story continues below

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Article content continued

Deer Cave in Gunung Mulu National Park, Borneo.Getty Images

My aging brain has forgotten many local words, but not these: ‘Jaga! Jaga!‘ It means: ‘Be careful!’ I look at James and he looks reassuringly at me, but I notice his flashlight now sweeps the cave’s dim path with increased enthusiasm.

“What kind of snake?” I ask. He tells me it would likely be a cave racer. To comfort me, he tells me it is small — only two metres. To doubly comfort me, he adds it is slow-moving and its bite produces cramps and paralysis, but certainly not death. I am not comforted.

I know that the droppings from the millions of bats above my head have collected neck-deep on the cave floor and, were I forced to flee a snake, I’d have to consider the pudding-like consistency of the guano and the millions of cockroaches that swarm the droppings’ surface at either edge of the raised path.

Advertisement

Story continues below

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Article content continued

The cave’s scorpions, James had said earlier, were poisonous, but not deadly. Ditto the cave’s centipedes. The cave’s earwigs, which lick sweat off the bats suspended far above, are merely an annoyance when they fall on visitors’ heads.

When I dare lift my eyes toward the ceiling inside Deer Cave — something done with the vague awareness that there’s a lot of guano up there and a lot of gravity down here — its scale seems so colossal it is almost silly. The cavern, almost 150 metres high and a kilometre long, could house a dozen of North America’s domed stadiums with room leftover for all the world’s Taco Bells. Thirty storey-high waterfalls mist the cave’s air, adding a certain je ne sais quoito the smell of the guano-coated walkway.

Advertisement

Story continues below

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Article content continued

“The thing you have to watch out for is the spiders,” James finally confesses.

“Spiders?”

“Yeh. Huntsman spiders. Very bad.” He then precedes to tell me that the natives use the crushed spiders as the basic ingredient for the deadly poison they apply to their blowpipe dart-tips. He adds that the cave spiders are small and fast. They are also black!

This information does the trick. I no longer worry about snakes.

Risen from the dead

A tenting mid-July sun rose over Hungary’s enormous Lake Balaton with the promise of a day’s adventure. Myself and a friend would join Janos, the three of us sailing north across the 12 km.-wide lake to visit Janos’s girlfriend on the opposite shore.

Advertisement

Story continues below

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Article content continued

A Sunday morning’s trip on a small rented sailboat, lunch with the girlfriend’s family, back in the late afternoon to our international workcamp where we’d volunteered as summer labourers.

View of Belső-tó Lake and Balaton Lake.Getty Images

Midway through the return southward trip a thunderstorm moved across the vineyard-covered slopes above Siófok. The wind increased, the waves heightened, lightning began striking the darkening hills ahead, and Janos realized that tacking into the approaching storm was foolhardy.

We turned. The boom swung 180 degrees. Waves broke over the gunnels. I bailed madly. Sinking appeared inevitable. We found ourselves flying northward now, our emotions someplace between fright and exhilaration.

Advertisement

Story continues below

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Article content continued

We hit the cobbled beach at full speed, driving the centreboard upward with an awful screech. By the time we’d followed the shore’s trainline back to Janos’ girlfriend’s home, we were soaked, but safe.

A family member was deputized — the summer cottage had no phone — to head to the local stationmaster and have him send a teletype to the train stationmaster in Siófok that we’d be staying the night there, and would he convey this message to our boss at the nearby workcamp?

Late the next morning, while sailing southwest to return the boat to the Szántód rental facility, I noticed, far ahead, a helicopter making low passes over the lake as if it were searching for something. It was mid-afternoon when we docked the boat and I realized something was wrong. The approaching shop owner had launched a tirade in Hungarian aimed at Janos. He turned and translated: “They think we died. It’s on the news. It’s on TV. No one at the camp got our message. The police, the helicopter…they’ve been searching for us all day.”

Advertisement

Story continues below

This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.

Article content continued

Beach pier at Balaton lake in Keszthely town, Hungary.Getty Images

It gets worse. The police arrived, and the shouting and explanations began all over again. Despite having done nothing wrong, as we insisted, it seemed — having cost them so much wasted time and worry — we weren’t being sufficiently contrite.

It gets worse.

When we arrived back at the workcamp, our boss met us. The enraged words were in Hungarian, but I didn’t need a translator to know that we were, as he saw it, culpable for what happened. We’d screwed up. Worse: we’d embarrassed him! Our workmates greeted us as heroes — risen from the dead. But in our boss’s eyes, we should have died. In fact, I think he wished it.

Vancouver-based Daniel Wood is an international journalist and one of Canada’s leading magazine writers.

Share this article in your social network

Share this Story: The day I didn't die

Trending

Related Stories

This Week in Flyers

Article Comments

Comments

Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion and encourage all readers to share their views on our articles. Comments may take up to an hour for moderation before appearing on the site. We ask you to keep your comments relevant and respectful. We have enabled email notifications—you will now receive an email if you receive a reply to your comment, there is an update to a comment thread you follow or if a user you follow comments. Visit our Community Guidelines for more information and details on how to adjust your email settings.

Notice for the Postmedia Network

This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.